HE THOUGHT STAYED WITH ME ALL DAY, AND THEN ALL the way home. After all, it was a fairly important subject, at least to me: the impending end of all that was Me, and Me completely helpless to stop it. I was barely aware of the rush-hour traffic and hardly noticed that I had made it home somehow, apparently on automatic pilot. And I am sure that many things happened when I arrived—there was probably some kind of interaction with the family, and a meal of some sort, and then an hour or so of sitting on the couch watching television. But I have no memory of any of it, not even of Lily Anne. My entire mind was focused on that one terrible thought: Dexter was Doomed, and there was no wiggle room.

I went to bed, my brain still churning, and somehow I managed a few hours of sleep. But at work the next day, it was even harder to maintain my disguise of cheerful and geeky competence. Nothing actually went wrong; no one shot at me or tried to put me in leg irons, but I felt cold breath on the back of my neck. At any moment my Shadowy Friend might decide it was time to stop dithering and Drop the Dime on Dexter, and here I was at work in the lion’s den, the one place that would make it as easy as possible to slip the cuffs on my wrists and lead me away to Old Sparky.

But the day dragged on and nobody came for me. And then the next day followed, just like it was supposed to do, and still there was no howling of hounds in the distance, no heavy knock on my door, no jangle of chains in the hall. Everything around me stayed perfectly, maddeningly normal, no matter how hard I stared around me in complete ditherhood.

It would have been natural to expect that any move to take me down would be led by an enthusiastic Sergeant Doakes, but even he showed no sign of closing in, and there had been no repeat of the ominous encounter when I found him at my computer. I saw him glaring at me from a distance once or twice, and I had moments of paranoia when I was sure he knew—but he did nothing except watch me with his normal venom, just like always, which was no more than background radiation. Even Camilla Figg refrained from spilling more coffee on me. In fact, for several long and weary days, I didn’t bump into Camilla at all. I overheard Vince teasing her about a new boyfriend, and the bright scarlet of her blush when it was mentioned seemed to indicate that it was true. Not all that interesting to me, but at least she was no longer sneaking up on me with dangerous beverages.

But somebody actually was sneaking up on me, and I could feel him circling around out there, staying downwind but moving closer all the time. And yet, I saw nothing, I heard nothing, I found no evidence that there was even anything to see or hear, no sign that anybody at work or at home had any sinister interest in me at all. Everyone else continued to treat me with the same casual disregard they always had, totally oblivious to my profound anxiety. All my coworkers and family members seemed remarkably, annoyingly contented. In fact, happiness blossomed all around me like flowers in the spring; but there was no joy in Mudville, for Mighty Dexter was about to strike out, and I knew it. The heavy feet of Armageddon were tiptoeing up behind me and at any moment they would crash into my spine and it would all be over.

But it is a truism of life that no matter how much we are suffering, nobody else cares—generally speaking, nobody even notices. And so even though I was spending all my time waiting for the abrupt end to absolutely everything, life went on around me; and as if to rub my nose in my own misery, life seemed to turn strangely jolly for everybody but me. Everyone else in Miami suddenly and mysteriously filled up with offensive good cheer. Even my brother, Brian, seemed infected by the dreadful light-headed jolliness that plagued the rest of the city. I knew this because when I got home on the third night after reading Shadowblog, Brian’s car was parked in front of the house, and he himself was waiting for me inside, on the couch.

“Hello, brother,” he said, flashing me his terrible fake smile.

For a moment, Brian’s presence made no sense, because his routine was to come to our house for dinner every Friday night, and here he was on my couch on a Thursday night. And my badly damaged mental process was so completely occupied with my Shadow that I could not quite accept that Brian was really here, and I just blinked at him stupidly for several seconds.

“It’s not Friday,” I finally blurted, which seemed almost logical to me, but apparently he found it amusing, because his smile grew two sizes.

“That’s quite true,” he said, and before he could go on Rita rushed in with Lily Anne in one hand and a grocery bag clutched in the other.

“Oh, you’re home,” she said, which in my opinion topped my remark to Brian for obviousness. She dropped the grocery bag beside the couch, and to my great disappointment I saw that it contained a heap of papers instead of dinner. “Brian has a list,” she said, smiling fondly at my brother.

But before I could learn what kind of list and why I should care, Astor’s voice came down the hall, loud enough to crack glass. “Mom!” she yelled. “I can’t find my shoes!”

“Don’t be ridiculous— You just had them on— Here, Dexter,” Rita said, thrusting Lily Anne at me and hurrying down the hall, presumably to keep Astor from yelling again and cracking the house’s foundation.

I settled into the easy chair with Lily Anne and looked inquiringly at Brian. “Of course, it’s always good to see you,” I said, and he nodded, “but why are you here today? Instead of Friday.”

“Oh, I’ll be here Friday, too, I’m sure,” he said.

“Wonderful news,” I said. “But why?”

“Your lovely wife,” he said, tilting his head down the hall toward Rita, probably to make sure I knew he meant Rita and not one of my other lovely wives, “Rita, has enlisted me to help you search for a new house.”

“Oh,” I said, and I remembered that she had said something about this recently—but, of course, it had slipped my mind, since I was dwelling so selfishly on my one little problem of being on the verge of death and dishonor. “Well,” I said, more to fill the silence than anything else, and Brian agreed.

“Yes,” he said. “No time like the present.”

Before I could come up with a matching cliché, Rita stormed back into the room, still talking to Astor over her shoulder. “The sneakers are perfectly fine; just put them on; Cody, come on!” she said, picking up her purse from the coffee table. “Let’s go, everybody!”

And so, swept along in the wake of Hurricane Rita, we went.

I really and truly did not want to go house hunting, not now, not when my entire world was creaking in preparation for falling apart. The only thing I wanted to hunt was my Witness, and I could not do that from the backseat of Brian’s SUV. But I didn’t see any choice. I had to go along and pretend to be interested in comparative lanais and relative shrubbery, while the whole time I could think of nothing but the vastly unpleasant fate that was certain to be circling closer and closer with every four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath ranch house we crawled through.

And we spent the next evening after work, and that whole long weekend, and then the first half of the following week riding around in Brian’s SUV and looking at foreclosed houses in our area. My frustration and anxiety grew and ate away at me, and the houses we looked at seemed to be ominous symbols of my coming desolation. Every one of them was abandoned, with ragged shrubbery and lawns gone to weeds. They were all dark, too, their power shut off, and they seemed to loom over their forsaken yards like a bad memory. But they were all available cheap through Brian’s connections from his new job, and Rita tore into each one of them with a savage intensity that my brother seemed to find soothing. And in truth, even though I kept looking over my shoulder, physically as well as mentally, Rita made the process so frantic and all-consuming that I began to experience long periods of time when I forgot about my Shadow—sometimes five or six minutes at a stretch.

Even Cody and Astor got into the spirit of things. They would wander wide-eyed through the desolation of each abandoned house, staring into the empty rooms and marveling that such opulent emptiness might soon be all theirs. Astor would stand in the center of some pale blue bedroom with holes kicked in the walls, and she would stare up at the ceiling and murmur, “My room. My room.” And then Rita would hustle in and herd everyone back out to the car, spewing out staccato monologues about this being “the wrong school district, and the tax base is way too high—the neighborhood has a zoning change on appeal, and the whole house needs to be rewired and repiped,” and Brian would smile with genuine synthetic delight and drive us to the next house on his list.

And as Rita found brand-new and increasingly absurd objections to each house we looked at, the novelty wore off. Brian’s smile grew thinner and more patently phony, and I began to get very annoyed every time we climbed into his car to see one more house. Cody and Astor, too, seemed to feel that the whole thing was keeping them away from their Wii far too long, and why couldn’t we just pick a nice big house with a pool and be done with it?

But Rita was relentless. For her, there was always one more house to look at, and every single Next One was going to be the One, the ideal location for Total Domestic Felicity, and so we would all race grumpily on to another perfectly serviceable home, only to discover that a leak in the sprinkler system in the backyard was almost certainly causing a sinkhole under the turf, or there was a lien on the second mortgage, or killer bees had been seen nesting only two blocks away. It was always something, and Rita seemed unaware that she had spun off alone into a deep neurotic fugue of perpetual rejection.

And even more tragically, since our evenings, and all day Saturday and Sunday, were spent on this endless quest, they were not spent at home eating Rita’s cooking. I had thought I could put up with the house search as long as her roast pork turned up now and then, but that was now no more than a distant memory, along with her Thai noodles, mango paella, grilled chicken, and all else that was good in the world. My dinner hour became a hellish maze of burgers and pizzas, gobbled down in a grease-stained frenzy in between rushing through unsuitable houses, and when I finally put my foot down and demanded real food, the only relief I got was a box of chicken from Pollo Tropical. And then we were off into the endless cycle of negativity again, flinging away the chance to own another wonderful bargain, merely because the third bathroom had vinyl paneling instead of tile, and anyway the hot tub didn’t leave any room for a swing set.

And although Rita seemed to be generating real bliss for herself with her constant rejection of everything that had four walls and a roof, the endless quest did nothing for me except add to my feeling that I was watching helplessly as impending disaster roared down at me. I went home from our house hunting hungry and numb, and I went to work the same way. I managed to cross off only three addresses on my Honda list, and although that was not nearly enough, I could do nothing but grind my teeth and carry on with my disguise as it all spiraled upward into dizzy heights of aggravated frustration.

It was first thing in the morning on Wednesday when the great pimple that was Dexter’s Current Life finally came to a head. I had just settled in at my desk and begun to brace myself for another eight hours of wonder and bliss in the world of blood spatter, and I was actually feeling mildly grateful to be away from Rita’s frenetic search for the perfect home. Why did everything seem to go wrong all at once? It may have been sheer self-flattery, but I thought I was pretty good at handling a crisis—as long as they came at me one at a time. But to have to deal with finding a house and living on awful fast food and Astor’s braces and everything else while waiting for my unknown Shadow to strike in some unspecified way—it was starting to look like I would unravel long before I could handle anything at all. I had done so well for so long—why was it suddenly so hard to be me?

Still, I was apparently stuck with being myself, since nobody was offering me any better choices. So in a pitiful attempt to stop fretting and soldier on, I took two deep breaths and tried to put things in their proper perspective. All right: I was in a little bit of a bind, maybe several of them. But I had always found a way out of trouble before, hadn’t I? Of course I had. And didn’t that mean that I would somehow find a way out of the mess I was in now? Absolutely! That was who I was—a true champion who always came out on top. Every time!

And so even though I felt like a cheerleader for a team that wasn’t even in the game, I pasted a horrible fake cheerful grin on my face and got right to work by opening my e-mail.

But of course, that was exactly the wrong thing to do if I wanted to maintain my artificial optimism. Because naturally enough, the very first e-mail waiting for my attention was titled, “Crunch.” And there was absolutely no doubt in my mind who had sent it.

I have to say that my hand was not really trembling as I clicked it open, but that may have been only because of nervous exhaustion. And the e-mail was, in fact, exactly what I had thought: another note from my favorite correspondent. But this time it was brief and personal, rather than one of his long and rambling Shadowblogs. Just a few lines, but quite enough:!!! have finally figured out that we are more alike than you might want to think, and that is not good news for you. I know what I am going to do, and I am going to do it your way, and that is even worse news for you. Because now you can guess what’s coming but you can’t guess when.!!!It’s crunch time.

I stared at those few lines long enough to make my eyes ache, but the only thought that came to me was that I was still wearing my fake smile. I dropped it off my face and deleted the e-mail.

I don’t know how I got through that day, and I have no idea what I did on the job until five o’clock, when I found myself sitting in my car once more and crawling through traffic toward home. And my blankness lasted through the first long stretch of homecoming and house hunting, until finally, after Rita had already rejected three very nice houses, I found myself looking out the window of Brian’s car and realizing with growing horror that we were heading down a street that seemed vaguely familiar. And just as quickly I realized why: We were driving down the street toward the house where I had disposed of Valentine, and been caught in the act, the very place where all my misery and peril had begun—and just to make sure I collected my full share of unhappiness, Brian pulled the car over and parked it right in front of that exact house.

I suppose it made a certain sick sense. After all, I had chosen the house because it was foreclosed, and it was in the general area where we already lived, and in any case it was already clear that the Hand of Fate was working overtime to heap agony on poor undeserving Dexter. So I really should have expected it; but I hadn’t, and here it was anyway, and once again I was reduced to doing nothing but blinking stupidly—because what, after all, could I say? That I didn’t like this place because I had chopped up a clown here?

So I said nothing, and merely climbed out of the car and mutely followed the herd into that house of horror. And shortly I found myself standing in the kitchen right beside the counter that had been the very stage for Valentine’s final performance. But instead of holding a knife I was clutching Lily Anne and listening to Rita babble on about the high cost of getting mold out of the crawl space under the roof, while Cody and Astor slumped to the floor with their backs against the butcher-block counter. Brian’s eyes glazed over and his fake smile slid down his face and off the end of his chin; my stomach cleared its throat and growled a protest at the harsh treatment it had been getting lately, and all I could think about was that here I was in the one place I really and truly didn’t want to be. I would soon be dead or in jail, and because I was standing in the very kitchen where things had started to go wrong, I couldn’t think straight about anything at all. My stomach rumbled again, reminding me that I wasn’t even getting a decent last meal before my certain demise. Life was no longer even a cruel mockery; it had turned into an endless, pointless piling on of petty torments. And just to ratchet things up one more unnecessary notch, Rita began to tap her toe on the floor, and, as I glanced reflexively at her foot, I saw what seemed to be a small dark stain—was it possible? Had I missed a spot of vile sticky clown blood in my frenzied hurried cleanup? Was Rita really tip-tapping her toe in a dried blotch of something I had overlooked?

The world shrank down to that one small spot and the metronomic beat of Rita’s toe and for a long moment nothing else existed as I stared, and felt the sweat start, and heard my teeth begin to grind—

—and suddenly it was all too much and I could not stand another moment of this eternally repeating melodramatic loop and something deep inside me stood up, flexed its wings, and began to bellow.

And as this wild roar rattled the glass of my inner windows the mild and patient acceptance that had been my disguise for the last few nights shattered and crashed to the ground in a heap of flimsy shards. The real me kicked through the rubble to center stage and I stood there liberated, Dexter Unbound. “All right,” I said, and my voice cut through the blather of Rita’s never-ending objections. She paused in midwhine and looked at me, surprised. Cody and Astor sat up straight as they recognized the tone of Dark Command that had come into my voice. Lily Anne shifted uneasily in my arms, but I patted her back without taking my eyes off Rita. “Let’s go home,” I said, with the sharp-edged firmness I felt growing in the depths of my shadow self. “The old not-big-enough home.”

Rita blinked. “But Brian has one more place for us to see tonight,” she said.

“There’s no point,” I said. “The roof needs to be repiped and the kitchen clashes with the zoning. We’re going home.” And without pausing to enjoy her blank astonishment I turned from the room and headed for Brian’s car. Behind me I heard Cody and Astor scuffle to their feet and charge after me, and as I reached the car they had already caught up and started to argue about which game they were going to play on the Wii when we got home. Moments later Rita trickled out, with Brian at her elbow urging her along with soothing phoniness and real eagerness.

A very puzzled-looking Rita climbed into the front seat, and before she was even buckled in, Brian got behind the wheel, started the engine, and took us home.